A few weeks ago, it was announced that Rick Schwartz would be selling Flowers.mobi at the Traffic Miami live auction held by Rick Latona, and there would be no reserve price. Flowers.mobi was originally purchased for $200,000 when the extension was originally released. From what I understand, the lawyer from 1-800-Flowers was there, but Schwartz outbid him to win the domain name.

Since buying Flowers.mobi, a lot has changed with regards to the perception of .mobi domain names. I don’t believe I own (or my company owns) more than maybe a couple of hand registered .mobis. I don’t even track how .mobi domain names are selling, but I can’t remember the last one to crack DN Journal’s weekly sales report.

There are a number of questions that will soon be answered, but I am sure there are those who are already thinking about them. Will .mobi investors bid heavily on this domain name to help improve the value perception of the extension? Will someone buy it and build a profitable website?

One of the biggest questions is will 1-800-Flowers turn up and bid again? 1-800-Flowers is highly regarded when it comes to direct marketing and Internet marketing. Should they opt to not show up, having been willing to spend a lot of money just three years ago, it would really say something about what mainstream marketers really think about this extension.

About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has sold seven figures worth of domain names in the last five years. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest.

Comments (35)

i bought a couple of dot mobis when they first came out as backups to dotcoms i owned. dropped them after the first year as it became obvious they were worthless. kudos to schwartz for being ballsy enough to do this in public. even the winners lose sometimes.

let me guess you have never failed and how great you are king josh..come on get over your ego. you have an answer about everyone dont you?

some of you big domainers like you josh(congrats) in making it and etc need to reflect how you started out and how many mistakes you made along the way.. being humble and learning from failing is great.. you can 20 watches or big house with your ego.

it will probably sell for 4 figures. It has to sell for at least $1k because just for the keyword even i would buy this domain myself for $1k but its almost unheard of for a mobi name to sell for 5 figures or more these days regardless of who the buyer might be. even if 1-800 Flowers goes after it i bet they would win it for 4 figures this time.

It’s a great name for a branded delivery business, especially in Europe. With the name on the side of “green vehicle” It makes great advertising for the service regardless of whether it’s even used as a URL.

I don’t know, lately I’ve been thinking that maybe there is a little value to .mobi. I doubt it will get as much as Rick paid for it but I will tell you a year ago or so I hand reg’d PurityTest.mobi (My only mobi) with the intention of making a cell phone friendly purity test (still haven’t done it yet) and it is currently parked at Parked and gets a handful of uniques every day somehow, but more interestingly it gets a lot of searches on it each day from these uniques. Sometimes 200+ searches. I figure it must be bots but Parked usually filters and doesn’t display stats from bots. Who knows.

Whoever the highest bidder is…they will NOT end up paying for this domain(Fake Bidding)…then next highest bidder will NOT pay either(more fake bidding)…then they will contact the 3rd highest bidder and explain to him that you have an amazing opportunity to buy this domain name $10k cheaper because the highest bidder unfortunately could not close the deal…you have a great opportunity to own this name $10k less…what do you want to do? (SUCKER says, “i’ll take it”)…congratulations on being the new owner…you got a great bargain(SUCKER)!

That’s how the game works these days…if you havent been in a bidding war, you wouldn’t know!

I would be suprised if it changes hands for anything like $200k. What I dont understand is :

1) How would this domain ever get any traffic – I mean .mobi is hardly type-in fodder is it. Also, to get it top of google for ‘flowers’ would be nigh on impossible, considering the owners of the .com, .net, .everything else will be spending big seo bucks, out of existing cashflow, to stay there.

2) Unless the new owners are 1-800-Flowers then I should imagine that the new owners (especially were they to use the domain for any ‘flower related’ trade/ads) will get a lawsuit pretty soon from said company – and judging by recent decisions they would probably lose. Quite a gamble imo, why would anyone risk it.

-ADVERTISING
-CARVERTISING
-Or doing the opposite of what happens now- you type in Flower.mobi and end up buying from 1-800-Flowers
Now 1-800-Flowers of whomever would buy traffic from Adwords campaugns and other sites and send it to Flowers.mobi

Most likely the buyer would have a huge list of existing customers in the millions and they’d simply ping you by email to let you know of this or include a flyer with every delivery

i.e. MARKETING (something few domainers try- so they are giving up potential they’ve never explored)

Nothing makes me laugh more than watching grown men tell a huge company what they need when they clearly do not need it.

The FACT is no one has to this point cared about this name, it is of NO threat to the biggest end user(s), it has no real anything to speak of except its a ” keyword ” with a lot of hype due to its crap extension and nothing more. Car ads and marketing lmao, you make yourself look like a damn fool. Why not just apply this train of thought to ANY domain. When youre talking about this kind of money for a horrid extension you have to start pumping and hyping the crap out of it.

There is ZERO reason for this name to be worth $200k, ZERO.

What people like you bank on are fools, plenty of those with money in this business.

@ owen – If that domain sells for $200k+ then you will stand vindicated and you can say you were right and I was wrong. hurrah. It isnt impossible of course, there are indeed some deep but dumb pockets out there.
Put it this way, anyone with $200k to GAMBLE on such a purchase would probably do better looking at nice short type in .com’s that are already developed – they could buy several with that amount and be much better assured of not losing money, as well as possible ROI.

The current owner is a domain investor – therefore the domain has been ‘for sale’ since the moment it was pushed to his account. One can only assume that no company or individual has come even close to whatever asking price he had in mind, and a no-reserve auction becomes the only way out. Just a theory.

I tend to wonder whether the .mobi pumpers are doing so in a last desperate bid to salvage whatever sum they paid for their own rotten portfolio of difficult to monetize and even harder to shift non .com’s.

>>> And OMG wouldn’t you just love to see the faces of the soon to be ex-new-owners of flowers.mobi when they lose it by way of an imo easily winnable UDRP by either flowers.com, flowers.net, flowers.org etc etc – Maybe thats why its for sale – the very shrewd domain investor looks at the way the udrp process is going these days and decides to clean up some liabilities like flowers.mobi.

I doubt if you put up an ad saying flowers.mobi on a billboard that the average Internet user would even recognize/realize it as a website address. Not sure what they would think but there is no public education of the existence of .mobi as far as I can tell.

I think the final sale price will be disappointing to people trying to sell .mobi.Itâ€™s a tough market to be selling a top Mobi or any newer TLD. Obviously this name will sell at a big loss. Dot Mobi in particular has become virtually worthless on the wholesale level. As one whoâ€™s invested in Mobi hereâ€™s wishing you well with the sale.

I for one would like to thank Rick Shwartz for being a dushbag and outbidding an end user who actually was planning to develop it and brand it, and very possibly make mobi more popular as opposed to parking it as “DOmain King” did. domainers often do get bad rep for being squatters, and in this case Rick more then deserves that name.

I personally dont own any mobi, but i deal with a lot of end users and to them its mind boggling that you can own more then few domains. Thanks Rick .

Most hilariously of all at the same auction, and more telling of the general .mobi situation is the fact that “cellphones.mobi” – clearly a massively popular keyword amongst the ‘mobile’ generation, FAILED TO SELL AT $500 <<<<LMAO –
so yes, its easy to spot a .mobi 'investor' – they are the only ones who say theyre worth much more than their reg fee.

@Favorite Domains I guess it’s his loss. For starters I’d get a .mobi template on to it with a florists e-commerce store. That’s probably the only way Anunt would get his/her money back that is if he/she sells it as a website on flippa. Gee I sold a dot co dot in website for more than 6.5k. what a joke extension and it’s cousin dot (name) .

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